Predatory AI: How We Can Resist Corporate Capture of the Human Mind

Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science

We are told that AI is inevitable, a revolutionary next stage in planetary intelligence. The calculative power that Big Tech is harnessing via its AI products cannot be doubted. But what if humanity is entering into the wrong social contract with AI? A good future for humanity cannot mean inputting our lives into predatory AI models whose terms we don't control. It cannot mean trading away our own cognitive resources – and the power to define the future direction of the human mind – to corporations. It cannot mean ever greater cognitive dependence on business products, while ignoring the implications for environmental sustainability. A good future with AI must mean putting social, community and planetary values first.

In this talk Nick Couldry presents his forthcoming book, Predatory AI, in which he imagines a different social contract with AI, and a different future. In the talk, he will discuss the social damage currently being done at work, and particularly the education and creative sectors, by accepting the wrong social contract with AI, and will debunk the philosophical prejudices that block us from valuing our own human cognitive resources.

Commentators: Anne Kaun and Molly Lundgren

The lecture will be followed by a reception.


Bio:
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics. His analysis of media as ‘practice’ has been widely influential. In the past 10 years, his work has increasingly focussed on data questions, and ethics, politics and deep social implications of AI, Big Data and small data practices. He is the author or editor of 18 books and many journal articles and book chapters.
In 2020 he co-founded the Tierra Comun tri-lingual website to encourage networking with and among Latin American scholars and activists interested in data colonialism.